I'd Walk with My Friends If I Could Find Them (3 page)

Big Dax smokes outside, his dirty, dry skin irritating him. He takes a drag and thinks of his high school friend Alston, how surprised he would be by Dax's cigarettes, even more so by the confident, uniformed man smoking them. He remembers when Alston left town in the middle of the night with his girlfriend, headed for Key West. Alston's last postcard had a picture of a clear lake, a small boat, and a golf course putting green floating right in the middle of the water. On the bottom: “Coeur d'Alene, Idaho.”

Dax has heard that the army is building a new public pool nearby. What he would give for a few laps without his Kevlar vest and helmet and heavy boots—to purge the dust from his ears, mouth, and chest. Dax pictures all the pools he has swum in. Not that strong in the water, he still desires the chlorinated depths. To immerse himself in a swimming pool would be to return home. He misses the cool water and the chemicals, the tanned female lifeguards, community pools, post pools, a banana-shaped pool at a Vegas resort he once visited. His neighbor's pool in Rutherford, New Jersey, where he grew up. That one had a four-foot-tall diving board, way too high for the six-foot-deep pool, but Dax and the neighbor kids would cannonball and jackknife off the board and float in the summer air and bet each other to belly-flop, although no one did. But while he starts to dwell in his comforting memory, he imagines a shadowed man there, in his neighbor's back yard, strapped with explosives, in a slow-motion diving board jump. The board fully flexes before launching the man high into the air, and eleven-year-old Dax and a couple of local kids watch the terrorist click the handheld detonator again and again, but nothing happens, only a violent fall into a too-shallow pool.

Big Dax wasn't in Rutherford the day the towers fell. Up visiting his grandparents in Watertown, New York, already signed up for the army but waiting for basic training, he watched the news for two days straight in disbelief. Dax pictured himself in camouflage, taking aim at people, missing, and he felt the nerves in his body ping. He would have to kill now, something he'd hoped to avoid when he signed up for the G.I. Bill and travel. In his transforming world, this is why he despised the terrorists: people dying, diving from the towers, it was dismal business to be sure, but now, after joining the army in a time of relative peace, he would be asked to shoot, and probably be shot at.

After returning home to three funerals in a week, Dax stayed up late replaying television clips of people jumping from the buildings. The news had stopped running them, and he couldn't understand why. Without these clips the whole disaster was like any other demolition of steel and concrete, but these scenes showed living men and women falling through the air. This is where the pain lived, in impossible choices on a clear late-summer morning. Dax had never considered choosing between flame and gravity, but watching the people fall to their deaths, weighing which way to die, he guessed he would pick gravity.

One night his father spied him watching the clips.

“We think we're more important than we are,” he said. “Each one of us. It's our biggest mistake. Remember this—you can love God, but God doesn't give a shit. You want to celebrate births and winning the lottery and graduations? You give credit to the heavens? Fine, but you better celebrate this shit as well.”

Dax hadn't thought much about God, about intervention or justice, so he sat there in his living room and stared at his sober father pointing at the television.

“It's okay to feel good when you make them pay.”

Tonight, in Afghanistan, Big Dax smokes his third cigarette down and snuffs the nub out on his forearm before flicking it away. Typically he performs this forearm trick in front of others, but lately he continues the move when alone, the singe becoming more and more bearable.

As he enters the room he sees Torres on his knees. Big Dax considers saying, “No one's listening,” but he swallows it down easily and walks to his bunk, lies back, and lets the nicotine work.

One day while on patrol in a mud village in the midday heat, Big Dax, Torres, and Wintric drink tea with a man rather than detaining him because there's no sign he's killed four Americans and a Dane over the past five months. As they leave, the man smiles and waves at them.

Later in the afternoon, an elderly man offers what the men guess is his daughter to Wintric. It's the opposite of what they've been briefed, that Afghan men would purposely disfigure—often with acid—the faces and bodies of adulterous women. Brown-eyed, short, and thin, the daughter smiles and widens her eyes when her father taps her leg with his cane. She offers her hand to Wintric in the narrow alley, and he steps close and takes back the girl's hijab to reveal her dark hair. The men are hot in their gear, but the shade of the alley helps.

“Hey,” Big Dax says, “don't do anything. There, I said it.”

“Second that,” says Torres, and strokes his rifle. “But seriously, don't do anything. You have five minutes to check that house for weapons. She can help. Be careful. We're not screwing around here.”

The father moves down the street, and Torres follows him for a few steps.

Big Dax leans on the thick mud wall of the building, waiting, thinking about the shade and the smell of roasting meat. He catches some kids staring him down from a house nearby, and he wonders if he had been born in that very alley what Afghan Dax would think of this man, with this rifle, leaning against this wall. He senses empathy there, but in scattered, fleeting fragments, not enough to care, not now, not with a few months to go.

After Wintric enters the shabby dwelling with the girl, he takes off his helmet and she turns to him and smiles. She motions him to a back room, but Wintric stays a couple steps inside the door. The girl walks back to him and touches his chest, but he can't feel the pressure underneath his Kevlar vest. He hasn't touched or been touched by a woman in months. She keeps her hand on his chest and raises her eyes to his. He watches the girl, not sure what's expected of him or why he's here, but he takes his time. On her right cheek, a tiny circular scar. Her lips are dry. She reminds him of no one and he feels a focused but nervous desire to touch her face.

Wintric reaches out and the girl's arms fall to her sides and she closes her eyes. He stops his hand inches from her face. He lifts his left arm and senses a weight and remembers he's holding his helmet. He sees it in his hand. He's here, in this home. He's in Afghanistan. When she opens her eyes, he turns and leaves.

The men walk in the dusty afternoon, and they soon pass a quail fight inside a tiny hall. Dozens of men circle a brown mat and cheer the frantic, bobbing birds.

“My state bird,” Wintric says. “Little bastards are easy picking where I'm from, and good eats.”

“Jersey doesn't have a state bird,” says Big Dax.

“I thought every state had one.”

“Isn't Jersey's the Shit Bird?” says Torres.

“We do have a horse and two ugly bitches on our flag,” Big Dax says. “That much I know.”

“We got a grizzly bear on ours, but no grizzlies,” says Wintric. “We got black bears. One ate the dog I grew up with.”

“Torres,” Big Dax says, “we found a true California hick.”

Wintric seizes the opportunity and talks about his rural hometown of Chester, about playing football on a losing team that carried fourteen guys total, about his respect for those who leave the logging town for other parts of the country.

Big Dax and Torres let him carry on. They don't ask any questions about the girl in the alley, but later, after drinking enough smuggled booze to feel something, Wintric tells them that he began to undress her but stopped himself. He says she grabbed his hands and placed them on her bare shoulders, and he left his hands there for a moment before walking out. He says he wouldn't be able to live with himself—a girl waits back home.

“No one's ever waiting, my friend,” says Big Dax. “They're living and moving on. And don't get mad. It sucks, but it's true.”

“That's bullshit,” says Torres.

“You know it's not,” says Big Dax, raising his voice. “You know about Billings and Winston and Henlish. What are their wives doing right now?”

“If you had someone at home, you'd know,” says Torres. “I feel sorry that this is all you have. It's pathetic.”

Big Dax turns to Wintric. “Billings and Winston and Henlish are trying to stay alive over here and their wives are banging the shit out of dudes at home.”

“Okay,” Wintric says.

“Okay?”

“Okay. I don't know them. That has nothing to do with me.”

“Fine,” says Big Dax.

“You have right now,” says Torres. “Then, when that's gone, you have the next moment, then that's it. What do you look forward to, man? If all it is is surviving, that's shit.”

“I see,” says Big Dax. “I'm crazy for seeing things the way they actually are. Reality tells me it's dangerous to believe that someone's waiting for you back home. Their lives are shit. We stay busy, keep our minds working. They get to worry and pretend they're fine with us dodging bombs over here. And you know they have to act as if they're fine with it because if they don't, if they actually speak their minds, they're unpatriotic and bitches and everything else. You hate me for saying it. Fine.”

“Her name is Kristen,” says Wintric. “The girl at home. It's my fault. I haven't e-mailed. I told her not to. I don't know why.”

“One day the people we're trying to kill will be in charge again,” says Torres. “One day soon we'll negotiate with these fucks, even though they've killed us and tortured us and today we're trying to kill them. No one will remember 2004 or us breathing in the fucking burn-pit smoke or the bomb that almost took off my arm. None of this will have happened. So yes, I think about who's waiting for me, because if I think about all this, I'm done. I got kids, man, so be careful.”

“I'm not commenting on Anna, your kids, or whatever,” says Big Dax, “just reality. Dude, you may be a lucky one. People change. That's all I'm saying. They're living every day that we live.”

“That's enough,” says Torres. “Don't say this shit again.”

“You guys believe what you want to.”

So Torres believes. He lives his return home in advance. He feels the departure out of Afghanistan, out of Kyrgyzstan, out of Germany, the packed jet, restless legs, nervous energy, the Atlantic, the boredom, the squiggly coastline of Maryland and Delaware, landing at Baltimore, buying a magnet of Colorado in a gift shop, flying across farmland, the Rockies bringing him to tears, into Colorado Springs. He sees his family running to him in the airport, his daughters jumping into his arms, them arguing about who gets to ride on his shoulders, walking into the home Anna bought while he was away, and after his girls are tucked in, Anna's skin and weight pressed against him, her hands and mouth on him, on top of him, under him, the pressure build and release, home.

Wintric sees Kristen naked on the shore of Lake Almanor late at night, standing on a stump in the low beams of his Bronco, waving her arms, singing, urging him out of the water, to come to her and this place, his home, again.

2

T
HE TOP OF
the World is a clearing cut into a hill outside Chester, California, and from that height Wintric watches a column of white smoke pushing out hard from the mill. Inside, men strip and cut trees into boards. Some of the workers tell their children they're making clouds—Wintric's father had told him this years ago—but from the Top of the World Wintric can see the plume dissolve into the air well below the slow-shifting cumulus.

The bet is up to thirty dollars, and the .38 special feels just right in Wintric's callused hands as he squeezes the gun's handle. He's gathered his long brown hair behind him in a band, and his left big toe claws at a fresh hole in his shoe from a nail he caught working construction out by the sewers. He kicks some of the construction paycheck to his mom and dad to keep the electricity on, but the betting windfalls he keeps for himself.

Young men he passes every day in high school shout obscenities as Wintric takes aim at a target the instigators squint to see. Today there's a run on
motherfucker
and
bitch.
The rules: they can shout and move about, anything except touch him. Tall trucks with gnarly tires line up at their backs. Ponderosa pines surround them, many with white chalk lines around their trunks where they'll be cut.

Kristen sits in Wintric's Bronco, swings her long legs out the side, and sings to Metallica. Her green eyes look out through mirrored sunglasses on a scene she's witnessed plenty of times, and she wonders if this is one of those outings when he'll purposely miss so the second round of bets nets over fifty bucks. She stays in the truck in case they have to leave in a hurry, but she feels relaxed as she hears her voice mesh with James Hetfield's. She watches Wintric take the verbal abuse in his green Levi's T-shirt, his young face, the squint he never seems to lose. To her, he seems most alive on these betting runs and other afternoons when he drives her deep into the woods on back roads and chances getting the Bronco stuck. She knows Wintric's routine and senses that he's about to perform the wipe-the-forehead move. It's hotter than usual for late May, and she guesses that if everything goes well she may score an ice cream soda out of this if he leaves in a good mood.

A new smile rounds at the corners of Wintric's mouth. He knows this game's conclusion, but he lets the boys in their flannel shirts go at him a little longer. He has to play the whole thing up, even lose sometimes, or people will stop wagering. He drops the gun to his side and shakes his head. He wipes his sweatless brow. His toe digs at his shoe. After a theatrical exhalation he lifts the handgun and pictures the new boots he will buy: black steel-toe boots on sale down in Chico. The advertisement he saw on television says you can drop a thousand pounds on them without so much as a dent. He keeps both eyes open and visualizes the bullet's trajectory all the way to the target, a skill he's been able to conjure for as long as he can remember. One of the boys calls Wintric's mother a cunt, which he would normally fight over, but the money's too easy to take the insult as an insult.
Just a game,
he thinks. Still, the word hits Wintric enough for him to say, “Through the capital
P.
”